The News Sorority Read online

  The CBS executives’ elation continued that week, “because they saw the numbers,” says the CBS man. “They had promoted the hell out of it. They had spent a fortune advertising it. Her numbers the first week were unbelievably huge.” Thirteen and a half million viewers (which was more than half of the then twenty-five million six-thirty network news viewers) watched that first show, and the numbers pretty much held for the week.

  Katie’s retooling, as Joe Hagan would later describe it in New York magazine, gave the news “a chatty, friendly vibe and a bright casual atmosphere never seen before at 6:30 p.m. There were fewer headlines, more news features and off-the-cuff reactions from Katie.” The CBS man: “Katie thought if you brought in a show that was more human or friendly, people would relate. Deep down, she’s not a hard newsperson. She’s not. That was reflected in the broadcast she went on to do.” (This is an assessment three female CBS News producers independently affirm. She could do hard news—announce it, report it, conduct hard news interviews—but hard news was not her passion; it was not, at base, who she was.)*

  Jeff Fager, current first chairman of CBS News, perhaps puts it best: “Newspeople become celebrities, but celebrities don’t become newspeople. It’s an important distinction. Someone who’s a celebrity shouldn’t be brought in to anchor a newscast.” He was speaking in the hypothetical, but his meaning, especially considering its timing (Fager made this comment, in an interview for this book, shortly after he assumed his current position and mere days before it was announced that Katie was leaving as anchor), seemed clear: Despite her previous experience with hard news, Katie had a personal celebrity quotient that was unusually high, according to the old template for a traditional news anchor, and this was distracting.

  Things changed quickly. Over weeks, and then months, “the executives watched the air come out of the tire and a lot of the press turned and Katie was just getting hammered and couldn’t buy a break—it was pretty brutal,” says the CBS man.

  As the ratings sank and the grumbles—from traditional serious-news professionals, affiliates, and critics—increased, quick, urgent, nervous repairs were made. The friendly “Hi, everyone” was replaced by a dignified “Hello, everyone.” The closing shot that showed Katie’s legs was scrapped in favor of a seated shot. “Free Speech” clearly didn’t work—Socolow and Cronkite had watched the segments and thought, says Socolow, “‘Holy cow! A guy in Colorado saying the Columbine massacre was the result of godlessness . . . ?’ ‘Free Speech’ made no sense at all.” It was dropped with a thud. Katie’s voice was called “grating.” The celebrity gets went unappreciated: Two and a half weeks in, Michael J. Fox came on, right after Rush Limbaugh had mocked his Parkinson’s symptoms and accused him of being a “faker” in a public service commercial. “Fox was a big name and Katie got him because of who she was,” says the senior staffer. “Yes, it was a news story,” because of the Limbaugh attacks. “But I’m not sure our news audience cared about Michael J. Fox.”

  Cronkite was upset at Katie’s version of the broadcast for abandoning its audience—and its principles. “It was a disaster,” Socolow bluntly says, sharing Cronkite’s opinion. But, in hindsight, Socolow is somewhat sympathetic. “Katie went through a rough debut. They had a lot of false starts.” They tried to make the Evening News “like the local news”—a stinging put-down. “The ‘wisdom’ was to make it viewer-friendly, to go for younger viewers,” which made no sense to Socolow and Cronkite. The average age of CBS Evening News viewers “is sixty-one or sixty-two. Yet they’re always trying to ‘youthify.’ But look at the ads—they’re all for medicines, like Viagra, for older guys who can’t get it up! It’s stunning. The advertisers have a better view of the audience than the people putting on the show.” (Socolow gives this personal aside to illustrate what Katie was up against: “I have three children, in their forties”—the demographic Katie and her producers sought. “They have not read a newspaper in who knows how many years. They do not watch the evening news. They get all their news off the Internet.”)

  Seven months in, in April 2007, the failure of the experiment was pretty clear: The numbers had plummeted by almost two-thirds from the first week’s figures, to 5.5 million viewers, the lowest for the program in twenty years. (Though that low viewer figure would be reprised in early September, the number would soon slightly improve, to six million to seven million viewers a night.) “It was unfair” that Katie was publicly blamed, says the CBS man. “But I gotta say: When you fashion yourself as a celebrity—which she does; she lives by that—then you are completely at the mercy of a celebrity beating. I don’t think” her new colleagues at CBS News “were particularly sympathetic to her when” it fell apart. “It was, ‘This is your game. You brought your game to our place. So don’t look at us to save your butt.’”

  Bob Schieffer makes a bit of the same point, indirectly but leadingly. “The whole thing with Katie is so delicate, and so anything I would say would be misconstrued,” he says, possibly referring to the fact that he had been named in an article as a possible leaker of anti-Katie information. Still, he continues: “I was really part of the Welcome Wagon for her. And because, after me, the ratings went into the toilet, this would be misunderstood.” Couching his words in seeming diplomacy, Schieffer appears to be saying: I, longtime CBS News man, brought the numbers up in my year and a half as interim anchor. I was gracious when Katie replaced me—and then she failed.

  Others in the news department shared the sentiment. “The resentment was virtually immediate,” recalls the CBS man. “The burden was on her. People were waiting to see her disprove the reputation she arrived with. You’ve gotta be conscious of the fact that you’re making at least ten or fifteen or twenty times more than anybody else on the show.”

  As well, CBS spent other money on her. “All the money went to her—it wasn’t just the salary,” says the senior staffer. “They hired all these people to come with her—producers, a creative director,” and others, including a makeup artist. This is not an unusual situation in, say, a high-stakes, game-changing entertainment division show. But for old-school, frugal, earn-your-way-up CBS News, it was new. “CBS putting a lot of money into her meant they didn’t put it into the physical plant, they didn’t put it into the story gathering. It was hard for other people to get raises.” Even more: Some eminent correspondent stars at 60 Minutes, where Katie also was doing stories, were asked to take salary cuts. Ed Bradley was asked to take a decrease before his death, two months after Katie started. Morley Safer took 30 percent less salary (for fewer working hours), and Lesley Stahl was asked to take a half million dollars less in salary.

  The CBS man: “You know the saying, ‘Of those to whom much is given much is expected’? I don’t think she understood that part. To be sure, she tried in a couple of ways. Katie can put on a charm offensive if she wants to. It was like: After there’s a divorce in the family and your father gets remarried, in comes the stepmother . . . and she’s smiling at you the whole time. But really, she doesn’t give a shit about you. She cared about you only as much as it affected her.

  “She expected that everyone was working for her and was extending her brand,” he continues. “She started a blog, Couric & Co. And [people at CBS] said, ‘Do you want to blog on it?’” But this man’s attitude, and that of others, was: “‘I’m not contributing to her blog! If I want to blog, I’ll create my own blog. I’m already giving enough to Katie’s show!’” Having once been asked to yield his producer to her when he was in the midst of a big story, he refused, saying, “‘She cannot have my producer! She’s taken everything else in this building!’ She’d have three-camera shoots, which were just unheard of ” at the proudly nuts-and-bolts CBS News. “Some of us would have trouble getting a camera because they were all with Katie.”

  Others complained that, as the senior staffer puts it, “If you worked really hard for her, she might not even recognize it, or she might end up criticizing you.” The Ra
ther aide, who said she spent “a lot of time chasing Katie to do her homework,” says, “You’d write all this stuff for her and then she would read it and say it wasn’t what she wanted, and you’d say, ‘Katie, I have it in my notes that this is exactly what you asked for,’ and she’d be angry.”

  The CBS man: “So it was her world versus everybody else’s.”

  Katie and the team she brought over from NBC felt the animus—they felt ganged up on—and their reaction, says one team member, was this: “CBS was not supportive. There is a mentality there that your success is somebody else’s failure. At NBC, your success was everybody’s. It was a different culture.”

  As justified as much of the staff’s reaction to Katie seems, was any of it tinged with sexism? Would a very highly paid male morning person have been greeted in such a dukes-up way? Would he have been compared with a devious stepparent? Would “the burden,” as the CBS man put it, have been on him, from the start? Would the transfer of resources to the star—as excessive as they may have been in this case—have been quite as acutely noticed and resented?

  It’s hard to entirely disentangle the button-pushing uniqueness of Katie—and her behavior, and the money involved in her arrival—from a possible deep-seated double standard. Even women who were critical of Katie say that, as one female producer puts it, when Katie entered, “it was an incredibly sexist time at CBS News. We had no women correspondents. They had fired so many of them. In our LA bureau they fired five women and kept all the men. And Sean McManus was impossible. He was such a guy’s guy, he could not even talk to a woman. He could not look a woman in the eye. He was uncomfortable around women, except for” one female executive brought in from another network who “acted like a little kitten” in his presence, this female staffer asserts. “It was a very macho atmosphere. You’d go to those meetings and they would talk about golf. The national editor once said, ‘You women should play golf more.’” A woman responded: “‘You know, you work five days a week; the other two you want to spend with your kids.’” This female producer continues: “And Paul Friedman was the most misogynistic. At one meeting someone said something like, ‘Well, we could have a woman do it.’ And Paul said, ‘Ah, women—the other race.’” Perhaps he meant this facetiously, but it was not perceived that way.

  Indeed, a remark that Friedman made one day, early in Katie’s tenure, drove this home, quite astonishingly. CBS News has an internal audio line called the McCurdy; everyone in the New York offices can hear over it. One day, during the beginning of Katie’s tenure as anchor, Friedman made a comment over the McCurdy during rehearsals. Friedman had, of course, been at ABC and had worked with Diane at Primetime. With the whole staff listening, he said, over the open McCurdy, about Katie: “The only person I’ve seen who looks worse without her makeup on is Diane Sawyer.”

  “I was blown back in my chair,” says a female producer. “What did it say about a man in senior management that he didn’t know he shouldn’t say that, of his boss, out loud?”

  • • •

  ULTIMATELY, THOUGH, in terms of her relations with her new colleagues, it was Katie’s seemingly flaunted unfriendliness to them that most of them deeply resented and felt hurt by. During the holiday season, “Katie held a huge Christmas party for her entourage only, which anybody on the second floor,” where many of the producers were, “could see. When Dan was there, every single person on the second floor got a Christmas present, which Dan paid for with his own money.” By contrast, Katie and her private guests “were singing and exchanging gifts, but we old guard got nothing. We would walk by and think: ‘What are we, chopped liver?’ She drew a very, very clear line in the sand.”

  It’s important to pause here and do yet another sexism reality check about the behavior of the anchor of CBS in relation to his or her staff. Yes, Dan Rather, a lifetime CBS man, may have given everyone holiday presents, but, says an executive who worked with him, he also “expected the waters to part for him” and he sometimes enlisted a CBS News producer to walk him across the street to ward off fans. And he was thin-skinned and temperamental: “I’ve seen Dan scream into a telephone at Leslie Moonves because he was angry at perceived slights,” this producer adds.

  Katie’s show was a risky, ambitious, and expensive experiment: to reinvigorate—to change—the news, to pull in a younger audience. That experiment didn’t work. And she—the highly paid star in a budget-strained TV news era—met with a relentlessly conservative national CBS audience and a stubborn difficulty in shedding her female morning star image, a stumbling block that male stars like Charlie Gibson and Tom Brokaw had not encountered when they moved from Morning to Evening. She also demonstrated a tin-eared approach to her new colleagues at the proud and family-like organization, and she demonstrated a lack of initiative in taking her role as managing editor of the CBS Evening News seriously. (“Traditionally, the anchors of the evening newscast not only had the title of managing editor, but they are managing editor,” says one who worked at CBS News. “They show up early during the day, have a hand in which stories are being covered. They read the script, talk to the correspondent about the script. They have enormous impact—some would say too much.” By contrast, “Katie was out doing other things. She was being a star.”) She was easy to blame, and she wasn’t un-blame-worthy. And her salary made her particularly easy to resent.

  There was also the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t factor, which tends to afflict risk-taking people in power who are experiencing suddenly downward trajectories. In March, with Katie’s numbers sinking, public and media criticism of her zigzagged from the charge that she was too soft . . . to the charge that she was too hard. Interviewing John and Elizabeth Edwards together for 60 Minutes, in their first joint interview since their decision for John to remain in the presidential race despite Elizabeth’s incurable cancer, Katie asked tough questions about how responsible to the electorate the decision to continue to run really was. Some thought Katie’s attitude was “callous,” “hostile,” and “cold.”

  But a year later—for what it was worth—Katie was vindicated: It was revealed that Edwards had had at least a fleeting affair with his campaign videographer Rielle Hunter (and, of course, it was later revealed that it was more than fleeting and that Hunter had had his baby) and that Elizabeth—at the time of Katie’s interview with them—had known about the indiscretion, any ultimate revelation of which could have sunk the Democrats had Edwards become the Democratic nominee for president. Given this new information, Katie’s toughness on them in March now seemed retroactively justified. Katie, with her strong interviewer’s instincts, had sensed that the Edwardses had been disingenuous about something during that conversation; she just didn’t know what it was—and her toughness on them was a bit of a smoke-out, a probe.

  Katie’s toughness was displayed to the public, too. The Katie-who-never-lets-you-see-her-cry—the wry counter of slights, always invigorated when underestimated or dismissed—came through in Joe Hagan’s New York cover story. “I think [it] bugs people even more that I’m not a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown” over the bad press and ratings, she said, with startlingly frank bitterness. “It’s probably disappointing to some people.”

  In private, Katie—who had recently turned fifty—was now beginning to actively and repeatedly compare herself to the embattled but energized Hillary Clinton. Katie deeply related to Hillary; she felt she was being pummeled as first female anchor just like Clinton was being pummeled as first major female presidential primary candidate. Moreover, she saw, through her own experience and sensitivities, what even many women didn’t see until after the 2008 election: how many casual remarks about Hillary Clinton were sexist. A female producer says, “We would be at meetings, Katie and I, and she would say to me afterward, ‘I know that you feel the same way that I do’” about tossed-off remarks by the men in the room about Hillary’s appearance. “It was a little bond” they had, this female producer and K
atie seeing what others did not see. Katie’s feminism—wryly expressed—came out during these difficult months at CBS News, in remarks such as, “I’ve . . . decided [that] ‘gravitas’ . . . is Latin for ‘testicles,’” and “What is the word for a male diva? A divo?” The complicated fact is that even those women at CBS who saw Katie as deficient in certain things—solidarity with her colleagues, full-bore seriousness about hard news—appreciated her serious feminism.

  Katie protested the bullying of girls at her daughters’ Manhattan private school several years before teen bullying became a high-profile issue. And at work, “Katie would correct me when I would say things that were not gender-friendly,” says a female producer who didn’t otherwise find working with her fulfilling. This producer adds, “She’s very aware of these issues. She’s very pro-woman. It’s her and her girls—her daughters, Ellie and Carrie. She wanted to be the first woman in that anchor chair to empower other women—that was real.”

  • • •

  IN MARCH 2007, Rome Hartman was fired, and Rick Kaplan was hired to straighten out the show. This was the same Rick Kaplan whom Diane had had dismissed from Primetime. Rick came in as the tough, forceful savior. “When Rick came, things calmed down, without a doubt,” says the CBS man. “Things had been coming off the rails for Katie—she was flailing, she was getting hammered in the press—and I think she kind of looked at him and said, ‘You do it.’ He held her in check. He’s big and loud—those are his weapons—but he’s really a pussycat. He’s like a big little boy. And when she’d push the line he’d look at her and say, ‘No! We’re doing it this way!’ He protected her and solidified things and the criticism stopped.” Rick himself puts it this way: “I went back to some basic journalistic principles. Katie and I just decided we were going to raise the bar big-time. We were going to show off her interviewing skills and her journalistic skills. We were going to make the evening news all it could be.”